Human languages have intricately structured sound systems that provide resources for distinguishing indefinitely many basic units and for realizing their combinations in the streams of sound that constitute utterances.  And there are, at the other end, highly articulated syntactic structures that play a central role in fitting together the meanings of the basic units—words and grammatical morphemes like tense and number markings—to create complex messages. Linguistic semantics in the past few decades has made tremendous strides by focusing on combinatorial meaning, the systematic principles that assign meanings to syntactically structured complex expressions on the basis of the meanings of their constituents. 

 

But what about the meanings of the basic linguistic units?  One of the most striking features of human languages  is the widespread indexicality or context-dependence of their semantic atoms.  Words like I and this and now and other standard indexicals have often been thought of as exotic elements that might be dispensed with. In a real sense, however, they are only the most obvious exemplars of a much larger stock of expressions whose semantic significance is at least partly contextually supplied.  For example, Angelika Kratzer has argued that the modals must and can have a wide array of uses that rely on contextually provided material.  Dependence  on context  is not unconstrained, however.  Much of what we know about word meanings involves knowing what kinds of contextual factors are relevant for helping determine the contribution those words make to what is said and what  is conveyed by utterances in which they figure.

 

Arguably, the genius of human language is its provision of systematic ways to insert new material into old forms.  Linguists have generally emphasized the productivity created by syntactic structure, and this is  certainly very important.  But also critical are the many specific pragmatic parameters we find in natural languages that allow interlocutors to adjust to changing circumstances and frame quite complex new messages suitable for new times and relevant to new situations.  People are able to assign values to these parameters so well in part because human communication never depends just on knowledge of linguistic form but also always draws on extralinguistic knowledge interlocutors have about one another and their topic as well as on use of other communicative media available (e.g., facial expressions and gestures and 'tone of voice'). 

 

Write a brief essay exploring the thesis that language matters so much in human life and thought because there is so little 'matter' firmly attached to its forms.